Marseille. King-fu champion of France, among other great wins, 24-year-old Yvan Sorel has created a mixed martial arts club in the northern district of Marseilles called Team Sorel, which receives those who have a hard time finding their place in society. A fighter at heart, he puts all his energy into teaching his students about not only fighting, but also about life.

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Nicolas Wadimoff did not have much to do here: Yvan Sorel is such a complex person that he is made for the camera, lending Spartiates all the strength it needs. Although with very noble intentions, Sorel uses controversial methods such as threatening to hit a boy if he doesn’t go to school, or making his students take blows to the abdomen as a form of discipline. The scene, which seems to have been taken straight from The Wire, is brutal. Sorel lets himself be filmed warts and all by a filmmaker who is there for fights, moments of anger and times of distress. However, Sorel’s strength starts to eat away at the film, which in the end retreats to observing discussions, training session and fights. What’s missing is a real look at the state of the city of Marseille, the political battles between right and left, which is skirted only briefly in one scene. Spartiates therefore loses the battle as it gets stuck on Sorel.